Sunday assorted links
1. Profile of Amy Finkelstein.
2. 1/3 test positive in a semi-random Chelsea, Mass. sample. And “Notably, 43.2% (95% CI 32.2-54.7%) of the confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infections detected across the two surveys were asymptomatic.” That is from northern Italy. and a further critique of the Santa Clara study.
3. Droplet more significant transmission than aerosol?
5. “According to the Navy, the classroom antics had a darker side.”
6. The new Magnus Carlsen tournament. And new @pmarca book recommendations.
7. NYT survey piece on heterogeneities.
8. Good and extensive west coast Kaiser data set, and further evidence that R doesn’t fall nearly as much as you might wish for. If you are advocating an extended lockdown, you really need to think this one through and present your reasoning. So far I don’t see enough people doing that, nothing close, including the economists maybe even especially the economists. Right now this is one of the biggest deficiencies in the debate.
9. Countries that have banned alcohol as part of their Covid-19 response. It is striking to me how accepting the American coastal intelligentsia is of a strict lockdown, yet a permanent ban on alcohol is to them an unacceptable idea, curtailing basic liberties and impractical.
10. “…stay-at-home orders caused people to stay at home: county-level measures of mobility declined by between 9% and 13% by the day after the stay-at-home order went into effect.” And: “We show that COVID-19 as a whole reduced consumer spending in a panel of over 1 million small businesses by 40% year-over-year. Conversely, COVID-19 did not affect aggregate consumer spending at 3,600 large businesses.3…Consumer spending at the brick-and mortar stores of large firms fell by 9%, but online transactions at these large firms increased by 56%.”
11. All this debt during a global recession is in fact dangerous.
12. William Hanage and Helen Jenkins at WaPo cover the IHME model with some seriousness. Good piece, but we should have been debating this six weeks ago or more.
13. Andrew Gelman on the Santa Clara study (brutal).